2022 Highlight
06.25 - 07.13
SANDBOX
CHUNG Chia-Chun
Solo Exhibition
The complex of human world has always been CHUNG’s major concern. CHUNG’s work has a special power to highlight irony behind humor in the context of human society.
By taking subjects from his everyday encounters, CHUNG reflects the relation between self-existence and the social world. His signature figure “the charcoal man” sometimes leads the story, while other times serves as an omniscient point of view towards those colorful settings.
The exhibition theme “Sandbox” refers to the sand playground where kids are invited to create and destroy without rules. In this exhibition, CHUNG will present a series of work examining how we are affected by the social norms in his unique visual language.eel the joy of living when hardships, sorrow, anger and resentment are transformed into paintings and beautifully existing.
"When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the ‘open world’ concept of video games, where users were given a lot of options that would channel the games to different consequences.
It turns out that I was not the one who manipulated it;
I was only clicking on one of the buttons.
Anyone who had ever tried to go beyond the rules would be asked to try another option or simply got kicked out of the game..."
——CHUNG Chia-Chun
CHUNG Chia-Chun (b.1992, TW) is a young emerging artist based in Taiwan.
CHUNG’s work centers around the absurdity of human life; in his portrait painting, he reinterpreted the traditional concept of major drawing/painting media such as charcoal, crayon, and acrylic, creating a mysterious yet irresistible atmosphere.
Often taking inspiration from reading books and his everyday life, CHUNG’s work captures the inevitability of human struggles swinging between the eternal state of solitude and the desire of seeking recognition with standard social values.
CHUNG has been invited in many international group exhibitions; his recent participations include 'MIXED GENE" at Waow Gallery Beijing 2022, "Gentle Distraction" at Août Gallery Beirut 2021 and "Universes 4" at Galerie Droste Paris 2021 curated by Saša Bogojev.
"I have been thinking about how to show Albert Camus’ spirit in my work, especially about his non-violent yet ever-resisting attitude toward the absurdity that life presents to him and how he confronts it.
In fact, Camus is not resisting anything specific.
From that I begin to be aware of my anxiety, of which I have been quite proud, for it seems to draw a line between myself and other people, to reveal how absurd absurdity is and to point out the fact that people like to circle themselves in a boundary of rationality and restrictions they themselves make up.
A madman can only communicate his rationality to the world in abstraction – I embed mine into the idea of sandbox where rationality and irrationality form each other.
To me it is a romantic liberation."
—— CHUNG Chia-Chun
